By MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
It's sadly what we've come to expect: advocates for saving the planet -- and present and future lives with it -- and those who protest financial crimes and improprieties get arrested, charged, and often serve jail time, but those responsible among the corporate and financial elite go free.
Enbridge is a massive intertnational oil and gas pipeline company (based in Canada) that, as noted in a study by the Polaris Institute, fesses upto large scale environmental damage:
Thousands of litres of dangerous fluids are released from the company ’s pipelines and holding tanks into the environment each year.
According to Enbridge’s own data, between 1999 and 2010 , across all of the company’s operations there were 804 spills that released 161,475 barrels of hydrocarbons into the environment.
This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1988.
Enbridge's most infamous spill in the US occurred along a pristine stretch of the Kalamazoo River in July of 2020. InsideClimateNews.com won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the first major tar sands oil spill in America:
It was near Marshall [Michigan] that an aging oil pipeline burst on July 25, 2010 and spilled more than one million gallons of heavy Canadian crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest inland oil pipeline spill in U.S. history, and its effects can still be seen today in the river and in the lives of the people who live near it. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates as much as 180,000 gallons of oil still lie on the river bottom and some of it is moving toward a Superfund site....
The Kalamazoo accident was the first major pipeline spill involving diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the same type of oil that will be carried by the Keystone XL pipeline if the Obama administration approves the project.
Bitumen is a tar-like substance that must be diluted with liquid chemicals before it can flow through pipelines. When the Michigan pipeline split open, the chemicals slowly evaporated and the bitumen began sinking to the river bottom.
From accusations of abuse of eminent domain, to toxic leakages, to facilitating excessive carbon production, to even charges of tacit condoning of paramilitary executions of opponents of pipeline work in Colombia, Enbridge is a big target for protestors when looking at corporations that, it appears, triumphantly bulldoze environmental interests and human rights out of their way.
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The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.... We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. - Rachel Carson
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